Everyone in this Bank is a Thief – 10 Suspects and Everybody Has A Secret…

Last Updated on April 22, 2026

Whether it was the cover, the name, or the blurb, I’m not sure, but once I saw Everyone in This Bank Is a Thief, I was hooked!

On the face of it, this is a high‑concept, locked‑door bank heist that doubles as a fiendishly intricate whodunnit, delivered with Benjamin Stevenson’s signature wit and meta flair.

It’s clever, funny, and structurally impressive, but the big caveat is that it is also so densely plotted that more casual mystery readers may occasionally feel as if they need a notebook to keep up.

The Story

This is the latest Ernest Cunningham mystery, following Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone and Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect, but it can be read as a standalone.

Ernest, now leaning into his reputation as an author‑turned‑reluctant sleuth, arrives with his fiancée Juliette at a small‑town Australian bank, believing they’re there to discuss a loan for their fledgling private investigation business.

Instead, the manager confesses he has an entirely different problem: his brother, the only person who knows the vault code, has disappeared, and he wants Ernest to find him.

Before Ernest can properly tackle the missing‑person puzzle, the situation escalates into a full‑blown hostage crisis.

The doors are chained, no one can enter or leave, and a masked, not‑entirely‑professional bank robber seizes control of the room.

When a body turns up, the stakes rise again: suddenly every hostage is also a suspect, and Ernest has to work out not just who is stealing what, but who is willing to kill for it.

Cast of Suspects

The fun of the novel lies in its ensemble of sharply drawn hostages, each of whom has arrived at the bank with their own agenda.

Alongside Ernest and Juliette, the cast includes:

• The bank robber, oddly uninterested in the actual cash, suggesting a deeper motive
• Winston, the manager, whose missing brother and professional desperation keep him under constant suspicion
• Felix, a newly hired security guard, armed with a gun that seems much too heavy for him and a backstory that doesn’t quite add up
• Michelle, the receptionist who appears out of her depth and strangely uninformed about her own workplace
• Remy, a film producer willing to go to extreme lengths to finance his projects
• A priest bound by a vow of silence, whose refusal to speak makes Ernest’s job infinitely harder
• A sick teenage girl and her carer grandmother
• A teenage gamer who is in the bank to deposit his recent winnings

Stevenson leans into the novel’s title by making sure everyone in the bank is a thief in some sense.

Some have stolen money or property; others have stolen time, ideas, reputations, or more metaphorical things like second chances and affection.

That thematic through‑line gives the story a satisfying cohesion: as Ernest digs into each person’s secrets, the question isn’t just who robbed the bank, but what they chose to steal from life, and why.

Multi-Layered Puzzles

The book is told in Ernest’s first‑person voice, framed retrospectively so that he is recounting the events of the heist with full knowledge of how it all ends. Well, sort of. He’s telling the story, but hasn’t quite worked out the culprit.

That allows Stevenson to play fair with the reader, and he makes this very clear, outlining, in great detail, exactly what happened, making sure that no clue is left out.

The narrative keeps circling back to earlier moments, highlighting apparently throwaway details and inviting you to fit the puzzle together alongside Ernest.

If you enjoy mysteries that are essentially literary logic problems, this will be catnip. The plot is thick with timelines, alibis, shifting motives, and tiny clues embedded in dialogue and description.

From the outset, I loved the feeling that the crime was being laid out honestly, and in hindsight, so that the challenge was less “spot the author’s trick” and more “can you actually hold all this information in your head long enough to use it?”

That’s also where the novel becomes a bit of a double‑edged sword.

For me, about a third of the way in, the sheer volume of specifics started to feel overwhelming. Unless you are the sort of reader who happily annotates or keeps notes, there are stretches where the constant layering of detail becomes difficult to track.

What begins as a beautifully clear setup – one bank, one heist, one missing man – balloons into a web of intersecting schemes, prior relationships, and overlapping thefts.

Intellectually, I admired the construction; practically, I sometimes felt as if the book had turned into a written‑down version of an extremely complicated game of Clue, where I’d misplaced my score sheet.

That said, the tone keeps things buoyant. Stevenson’s background is in comedy shows, so Ernest’s narration is dry, self‑deprecating, and full of genre‑savvy asides about the “rules” of detective fiction.

Fans of the earlier Ernest Cunningham books will recognize the playful meta touches, from nods to classic crime tropes to Ernest’s almost textbook application of mystery‑novel logic to a very real, very dangerous hostage situation.

The Payoff

Despite the locked‑room setting, the story rarely feels static. The heist unfolds in real time, but Ernest’s retrospective commentary and frequent revelations about what different people were really doing at key moments keep the narrative moving.

There is also an extra layer of tension when Ernest ends up trapped in the safe itself, recounting events while literally running out of air, which is a neat device that reinforces the ticking‑clock element.

Where the novel absolutely delivers is in its final act. All those painstakingly planted clues and character beats come together in a resolution that feels both surprising and, in hindsight, inevitable.

Even though I personally couldn’t begin to reconstruct how every character’s secret slotted into the grand design, the explanation is coherent and satisfying on the page.

There is nothing slapdash about the solution. The sense is very much that Benjamin Stevenson knew exactly where he was going from the first chapter, and he sticks the landing.

As a reader, I came away with huge respect for the craft involved. The mysteries are properly clued, the motives make sense once fully exposed, and the various “thefts”, both literal and metaphorical, tie back neatly to the book’s central idea.

My mild frustration sat more with my own ability (or lack thereof) to juggle it all, rather than with anything the author did or failed to do.

So, Is Everyone A Thief?

Everyone in This Bank Is a Thief is an impressively constructed, high‑energy twist on the bank‑heist thriller, anchored by Ernest Cunningham’s engaging narrative voice and a cast of suspects who are all, in their own ways, up to no good.

If you loved the previous Ernest novels, especially their blend of meta commentary, humor, and old‑fashioned fair‑play puzzling, this new outing is almost guaranteed to hit the spot.

If, however, you prefer your crime fiction a little looser and less diagram‑heavy, you may find this one tips over from satisfyingly intricate into slightly exhausting.

For me, it was a hugely enjoyable, cleverly written ride whose only real downside was that I sometimes felt I needed a whiteboard to keep track of the clues.

The storytelling is sharp, the dialogue witty, and the ultimate solution genuinely impressive, and if you do manage to solve the whole thing before Ernest lays it out, you can safely count yourself among the sharpest readers in the room.